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Snapchat has proven itself to be wildly popular with both business and personal accounts. Taking over a Snapchat account is a great way to collaborate with another business while sharing a variety of knowledge and perspectives.

Hey, guys. This is Shama. I hope you're all having a great Friday. I just got back from speaking at the Digital Sales Association meeting yesterday. I did their keynote. We talked about social media marketing. It was such a great audience of marketing and communication professionals, so if any of you guys are here watching, thank you so much for having me yesterday. I had a lovely time meeting all of you, and I'm so glad that you had great questions on social media. In fact, I am really walking my talk today because I am talking over Women in Tech's Snapchat, so if you're watching this live, you can go check out Women in Tech on Snapchat, and see all my snaps. Today, actually, as meta as this is, I wanted to talk to you about a great marketing strategy if you're using Snapchat, and that is to do Snapchat takeovers. For example, I am taking over for Women in Tech, which showcases different women in technology every week, and highlights their lessons, lives, and it's a great way to build your audience and attract a new follower base.
The neat thing about Snapchat takeovers is that it really combines two great marketing strategies. One is cross-collaboration, where you're working with others to help grow their brand, and they in turn are helping grow yours. The second is of course influencer marketing. At marketing's end, we work with so many clients, and I'll tell you iin 2016, one of our best strategies really has been influencer marketing. Finding the right influencers that the client's brand is going to be a natural fit for it, meaning that influencer already has the audience, right, that the client is trying to attract. It really is a match made in heaven. If you have a Snapchat account, it's a great idea to see which influencers your audience would like to learn from, and then go ahead and invite them to take over for a day, and see how your audience responds. It's really easy to do, and it's usually a win-win, because it helps grow the influencer's audience and it helps grow your audience.
I'm excited about Snapchat takeovers. I think we're going to see this with Instagram stories, too, very soon. I do not Snapchat personally, guys, but I'm happy to take over an account once in a while, so if you're there, say hi. If you have other questions or things you want to see me address on Facebook live, or through my Forbes or Ink pieces, or through the Marketing Zen blog, we have so much great content there, so if you haven't already checked it out, go to marketingzen.com/blog, and you can see all our great content. All right. Talk to you soon.

I give you a roundup of my favorite tech and business gift ideas for the 2016 holiday season.

Hey everyone, this is Shama. Every year, we do our annual tech and business gift guide, so this is this year's. A couple of years ago, some of you started asking me, what are great tech and business gifts to give to clients, family members, so forth, so every year, I guess, I've been doing my Shama's favorites list. This is what's on the list this year. By the way, links and everything will be below, so it should be easy to find. Not going to get into too many of the details. The links will be there so you guys can check it out; just going to give you the overview of some of the stuff that I absolutely love, right before holiday time, right before Christmas season and holiday season for those of you who like to be really politically correct.
This is one of my favorite things. This is the P.MAI bag. One of the hardest about carrying a laptop into board rooms and meetings is finding something relatively stylish to go along with it, and this thing absolutely rocks. It's leather. I got the one in cognac, and there's also one in black. I'll give you guys a quick peek at this. I love it. It's got a really nice interior. It's got a slot for a water bottle, as well. It comes with this really nice wristlet. Love the color, love the style. Great, I guess, low tech gift, but to carry all your tech stuff. I absolutely love it. I love how it actually stays when you put it down like that. Everything about this bag, it's my season's favorite bag for my laptop.
The second thing that I have on my list is called Mevo. It is a live event camera. All you really need is your iPhone and you can set it up to take multiple shots of one area and live stream it. You can also edit things on your iPhone, so great little gift for your favorite live streamer. Great for anyone who's just starting up with video, but even if you have a company or a client who's doing more videos, really anybody who now uses Facebook, especially with Facebook Live. I really love this thing. It's also really light, so you could throw one of these into your bag and be good to go. I really love it. It actually reminds me of a little mini robot, too, in some ways. I just think it's adorable.
The next two things that I have on here are from the same company called Nixplay. I love these guys. Full disclosure, they're a client. I own a lot of their products, and a lot of our team owns a lot of their products. This is their Nixplay Seed, which is really neat. I love giving this, by the way, to my family, parents, things like that, because you can upload pictures to the app and it'll automatically change the pictures on the frame. The frames also look really classy. They're not the dinky 90s frames that people are used to when we think digital frames. No, these are WiFi based cloud frames. Absolutely love them; they come in different sizes and they just make it so much more fun than looking at pictures on Snapchat or whatever. This, to me, is a really nice way to bring that into your house. I love this.
Then here's another one. Same company. Great color, too, by the way. This is a burnished bronze. This one actually detects, through light and such, when you walk into a room, which I think is really cool. It's got an activity sensor, it's got a light sensor, and has a hi-res display. Both favorite things. Again, I think sort of the theme this year has been a little more low tech high tech, which is really easy to use technology, which I am a huge fan of.
The other thing that I don't have on here, but you should totally check out, especially give our recent super moon, is the Astroscan Millennium Telescope. It's in this great red color. Super fun vintage gift for science or tech geeks, or really anyone who enjoys being able to look out into the other world, if you will. I'm a big fan; check that out. Again, great color, just think it's a fun gift.
These are all going to make great gifts, I'm sure, for the holiday season. That's my list. If you have other things that you like, that you're really excited about, leave a link in the comments and I'll check it out. Thanks, guys.

As the end of the year approaches, it's very important to have a strong marketing plan in place.

Hey you guys. Shama here. The only Facebook Live show on marketing that we know of. I know it's Friday afternoon. I'll try to keep this short. I am in Dallas, in my office, which is super rare. You guys usually catch me at coffee shops, conferences, and so forth. It's nice to be at home just for a little bit for a reprieve. Then, of course, I start trekking around, starting next week. I'll be speaking at the Pennsylvania Women's Conference. I've got some exciting stuff coming up. I'll keep you guys updated.
Today I wanted to talk to you briefly about Q4 Marketing. I know, exciting, but I've been talking to a lot of you actually on the phone today. I talked to a few clients as well, talking about how can you make Q4 really strong for you, for your company, for your department, whatever it is that you're trying to accomplish, and then make sure that 2017- I know, like 2017 ... starts off on a good note.
Let's talk about 2016 and how you can end this year on a great note for your marketing. We work with a lot of B2C clients, Business to Consumer, and of course if you're in any sort of retail, then you know that Q4 tends to be your biggest season, and sometimes the reason for your company, which is Christmas season, holidays, so forth.
I figured I would talk to you about some of the things I've been telling our clients about, Curate Marketing and Zen, in terms of what you can do for Q4. This is especially important if you haven't been great at marketing this year, so you know, "Mea Culpa," and then you can pick it up for 2017, but let's say for 2016 that you haven't been doing much and that you are just really serious about this last quarter and making sure that you are doing your big push for retail season. Here's what I'll say: your best friend in 2016, as we wrap up, is going to be leverage. Leverage, leverage, leverage, money, relationships, resources, because if you haven't been doing a lot of marketing, and you haven't built that up, that means you don't have a lot of collateral to really pull from, so you're going to have to learn how to leverage the other things you have.
Leveraging money, which what I mean by that is Facebook advertising, absolutely huge. Pay-per-click obviously is big with Google, but unless you have an established website, you've got a decent budget, lots of factors go into that, not that it can't be successful but this is kind of, "How can you get something rolling very quickly?" Facebook advertising is going to be great. It's still so cost-effective if done right. It just needs to be super-targeted. I'm a big proponent of Facebook advertising, especially if you know your buyer, you know your audience.
By the way, if you guys have questions, feel free to leave them in the comments and I promise I'll answer them later. I just want to make sure I get this information, I share it with you guys, but I promise I'll check questions later.
The other thing is Influencer Marketing. This is something we've had such amazing success with for our clients here. It's all about working with influencers to leverage their influence to get your products and services out there. We've just had such remarkable success, especially this year. This year has been the year of Influencer Marketing. If you know your audience, and you know that you don't have a very big audience, see which influencer you might be able to work with to offer tips, run some sort of deal or campaign with so you can leverage that. That's a really big one.
Then, of course, PR. PR is going to be your best friend, helps to build those relationships all along, but nothing says that you can't do a quick three-month campaign, or something leading up to Christmas season again, especially if you're in retail; very, very, important. It helps a lot.
Then, content. This is the other thing. If you have been doing your homework, and you've created lots of great content, this is your time to re-purpose that. In fact, one of the principles I talk about in Momentum is all about content curation. Content curation is not just, "How do you keep creating new content," but, "How do you re-package what you've done?"
In 2016, what were your top blog posts? Great. Do a post highlighting your most popular posts. This is a great time to recap, restructure, and re-purpose your content, which I think is Principle 3. Check out Momentum if you haven't already. It's in bookstores. Oh, and, 4th edition of Zen, also out now in bookstores. I can't believe the first edition was in 2010. It feels like an entire era has gone by. Thank you so much for those of you who have been readers, who sent me your comments, left Amazon reviews, and all that good stuff. I super appreciate it. The team here at Marketing Zen appreciates it.
I hope you guys have a great Friday afternoon, Saturday morning, or wherever you might be watching this. You guys know we have a global audience. Leave your questions in the comments and I promise I will check them out and do my best to answer them. Turn on Live notifications if you like this and you want to keep catching more future episodes. I'm actually literally reading. My producer, Matthew, has created this very nice paper for me, that you can't see. On the mobile, if you turn in the upper right corner of the video, you can turn on Live notifications. If you're watching this on the desktop, click "drop down" on the upper right of the post, and you can hit the little "subscribe" button and that way Facebook will let you know the next time we're Live, and hopefully this will help your marketing, your business, and all that other good stuff. Have a great weekend guys.

Instagram stories aim to take back the market share of users from Snapchat, who have been dominating the instant-sharing game lately. Hear my thoughts on Instagram stories, as well as the future of Twitter. Does Twitter need a management shakeup?

Hey guys, Shama here. Coming ot you live on Facebook, probably the only show on marketing on Facebook live. I try and bring this to you every Friday, regardless of where I am in the world. Today I wanted to talk about Instagram Stories and the future of Twitter. Here's the thing about Instagram Stories and what I'm really excited about.
I have to tell you, I can't believe Instagram took so long to do this because it's such a great competitive move against Snapchat. If you use Snapchat you know that it's all about the stories and things disappear very quickly. But a lot of the Snapchat users are keeping Instagram. So with Instagram doing this, introducing the stories version and great UX - great user experience. Whereas Snapchat is more intuitive for Gen Z - it feels very natural for a lot of people, it's felt very annoying for others like Gen Y, Gen X, baby-boomers. I've heard it pretty much from anyone over the age of 30 that Snapchat isn't user intuitive. Instagram doing this is a very smart move, so brands and businesses should really think about how you can use Instagram Stories now to tell your brand story and you won't have to be on Snapchat to be able to do that. I thin kit will be very interesting to watch what happens because Instagram has double the users Snapchat has and definitely an older user base as well. I'm so glad Instagram did this. A little late to the party, but none-the-less I'm glad and it's cool functionality. If you want to check out my Instagram, it's shamahyder. You can find me on Instagram and follow. I'll leave a link in the comments.
The other thing I wanted to talk about is Twitter. I was talking to a reporter earlier this week for USA Today, we were talking about Twitter and I was thinking about how far Twitter could have come and hasn't yet. What I predict is in the next 12 months an acquisition where a big player - like a Verizon or ATT or that type of player - comes in and buys Twitter, and I hope they do because Twitter needs better leadership. I'm not saying that the current leadership is necessarily bad, but they need fresh leadership, fresh perspectives. I think infusing that in Twitter is going to make such a difference. I'm also really bullish on Twitter, I love the platform. I will tell you that I don't think it's going away any time soon - it's still the only place to get real time information. So if I want to know what's going on in the political season - stories still break on Twitter faster than on the API. It's been that way for a long time.
It's still real time news. I'm really passionate about Twitter, I don't think it's going anywhere anytime soon. I do hope they bring in good leadership and really infuse it with new ideas because Twitter has a long way to go. So don't discount it just yet, check out Instagram Stories, leave me your questions and I'll do my best to answer them. Have a great Friday guys.